The random mental leaps of a grasshopper mind

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Pebble Beach

I did another pair of dives at Pebble Beach yesterday, this time as part of the East Coast Divers shore dive. It was good to see Ken Apple, who was running the dive, again.

For me, Pebble is not a particularly edifying site because you have a fairly long swim over the sand to get to the reefs, and getting into the water over all the cobbles can be hard. It was a little easier the first dive since the tide was low enough that the water’s edge was right at the sand.

Mostly what we saw was crabs. Lots of crabs, big and small.

Crab

Crab in the kelp

Sand Collar

Last week, at Folly, I shot a number of pictures of this thing, which I was vaguely aware was some sort of egg casing. I didn’t know what had made it, so I turned to my friend Ralph Fuller, of Poseidon’s Web, who identified it as a “sand collar”, an egg casing left by moon snails. I was a little surprised, because it doesn’t look at all snail shaped, and because it’s bigger than most moon snails I’ve seen.

Well, now I’m certainly a believer, because I saw the biggest moon snail I’ve ever seen. It’s very easy to see how it could have created something like that:

One of the biggest moon snails I’ve seen

I was diving with very new divers; Sam on the first dive, and Sam and Phillip on the second; both were newly certified. On the second dive, Philip managed to startle and grab a small lobster; he made his first lobster catch.